When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

“The point is, nothing in our universe, even the stuff that’s supposedly deleted from time and space, is ever really lost. It’s just hidden from our sight.” He smiled at me. “There are things about black holes that break all the rules—or expand them in a way we don’t understand yet. As if the universe wants to exist so badly it makes loopholes in its own rules. I find it comforting, like this is all meant to be somehow, and nothing can take any of it away. Like everything is forever.”

The song was more than happy or sad or scared; it was everything, all at once, a full lifetime of events and the feelings that went with them collapsed into notes.

This song was the sound of her, screaming across the sky. It held her whole life between notes, untranslatable to words.

Nick relaxed into the final chord and it hung there, like I’d known it would, and I wasn’t afraid for the moment it would end, but I was sad, because I would miss it. I closed my eyes, wanting the sound to overtake my other senses, to become a smell and a feeling—maybe a temperature and a humidity, the feeling of the air itself—and a taste and a color.

The sound was there, there, there, there, and then, at last, it was not.

“She’s not here anymore, but wherever she is, she loves you.

looked toward the sculpture, the massive Fibonacci spiral, proof the universe was in order, that some things might change size but they never lost their true shape. That things could be hidden but never truly erased.

Maybe he flew across the sky in a fiery blue streak, hearing the sound of his own name spoken—calling him—by everyone who loved him. Maybe he landed in a still, dark pool and felt joy bubble through his non-body, or maybe sometimes he crashed into the papery, soon-to-be fall leaves a hundred yards behind the house we’d once run around in swimming suits, darting through the trail of sprinklers, the yard where we’d played hide-and-seek from the minute we got off the bus to the moment the porch lights flicked three times into the blue night, calling us home for dinner. Maybe there were bits of him perched on eaves and phone lines watching the Splendor sunset turn the fluffy clouds the color of a Dreamsicle, and even if those bits flew into freshly Windexed glass panes or straight into the ground, then he would smell the wet dirt, feel it in his non-fingers, and taste it in his non-mouth. Maybe sometimes Mark came home.

Maybe Mark could be here, in this bed, and inside Wayne Hastings, and somewhere else all at once. Maybe Molly could be here, buried in the cemetery where her father left fresh flowers in the middle of the night, and somewhere out there, diving into a pool where time flattens out and all the secrets of the universe are stored.

Existing in a way our gooey human brains couldn’t handle without turning to soup.

How many billions of things had to happen just right to give me this ordinary life.

Sometimes a black hole rips through your life. Something—maybe even the thing you love the most—implodes, collapses right in front of you. And the gravitational force of the thing it forms is so strong it pulls on everything else, warps the very fabric of your little place in space-time. It bends the past around you so it keeps repeating, and you can’t see what comes next. You’ll want to run from it. You’ll want to escape before it can suck you into its darkness. But black holes don’t really suck. And whatever falls into them isn’t really gone. Even the light is just hidden. Just for now.

When I think of Mark, I picture him falling, diving headfirst toward the mysteries of the universe, a smile wide across his face. As he nears the event horizon, he moves slower and slower, and then he stops. Hovering, frozen. There he is, in my sight, forever. And even while that’s true, he’s also somewhere else. He’s crossing an invisible threshold, and there, then, he sees it. The answers. The past. The future. The light. Everything, all at once. He laughs. I know he laughs.